Olive, Again (ARC)

by Elizabeth Strout

  And so the year went by. At Christmas, Olive met Amy Goodrow and her husband, who was Asian—Olive already knew this from the photographs—and she was surprised by Amy in person; there was something at once kind about her, but also cool. Olive didn’t know what to make of her, but she told Isabelle after they had left—they had flown into town for three days—that she was a nice girl. “Oh, she is wonderful,” Isabelle said, and Olive thought about that, how much Isabelle adored this girl.

  Olive’s own family stayed in New York for Christmas. “They have all those little kids and the tree and all that foolishness,” Olive told Isabelle. And Isabelle said, “Of course they do.”

  Another spring slowly arrived.

  One evening Olive noticed that Bernie Green had some guests with him at supper. She watched from the doorway as she entered. They were a couple, maybe in their fifties, but as she watched she suddenly realized: Why, that’s the Larkin girl! So Olive walked over to their table, and she said, “Hello, are you the Larkin girl?”

  And the woman looked up at her, closing her dark red cardigan with one hand, and said, tentatively, “Yes?”

  Olive said, “I thought so. You look like your mother. I’m Olive Kitteridge. She used to be a guidance counselor at the school where I worked.”

  The woman said, “Well, I’m Suzanne, and this is my husband.” The man nodded at Olive pleasantly. Olive thought Suzanne was a pretty thing, though she seemed to Olive to have a pulse of sadness going through her.

  “Do you know—oh, this was years ago now—” Olive sat down at the empty chair at the table. “Your mother called me a cunt.”

  Suzanne Larkin’s hand went to her throat, and she looked at her husband, and then at Bernie. Bernie started to chuckle.

  “Oh, I deserved it,” Olive said. “I went to see her after my first husband died, and I went there because I thought her problems were worse than my own, and she knew that was why I was there, it was extraordinary, really, I never forgot it. But my word, what a word to use.”

  Suzanne Larkin looked at Olive, and then a sudden kindness came to her face. “I’m so sorry about that,” she said.

  And Olive said there was no reason to be sorry at all.

  “She just passed away this week,” the girl said.

  “Oh Godfrey,” Olive said. Then she said, “Well, I’m sorry. For you.”

  And the girl reached to touch Olive’s hand lightly. “No reason to be sorry.” She leaned in toward Olive. “At all.”

  Mostly, Olive and Isabelle spoke of their husbands, and also a little bit of their childhoods; Olive had told Isabelle right away that her father had killed himself in the kitchen of his house when Olive was thirty years old, and Isabelle’s face had shown genuine sorrow. This was important to Olive; had the woman appeared judgmental, Olive thought they might have stopped being friends. Only seldom did they mention their grandchildren, and one day Olive asked Isabelle why she didn’t talk more about her grandson, the fellow in California doing computer stuff. Isabelle put her hand to her chin as though thinking about this. “Well, talking about grandchildren can be boring for others, and also—” Here Isabelle sighed and looked around Olive’s living room—they traded off their places to visit—and said, “And also, I don’t really know him very well. The truth is, Olive, Amy is good to me, but she does live in Iowa, and I sometimes think when a child moves that far away they’re really trying to get away from something, and in this case I suspect it’s me.”

  Only then—in a certain way—did Olive fully understand why Christopher lived in New York City. “I guess you’re right,” she said slowly, the pain of this a reticulation spreading through her. And then she thought about Amy. That’s what her slight coolness had been: Amy loved her mother, but she was not close to her. The things that happen in childhood do not go away.

  “I love my grandson,” Isabelle was saying. “Oh, I do, but he’s not really a part of my life.”

  Olive swung her foot up and down. After a minute she told Isabelle how she had written a letter to Little Henry and one to his older brother, who had suddenly been nice to Olive, and they had both written back, and then she got a call from Christopher saying, “Mom, you need to write the girls as well.” And Olive had been stung by that, so she wrote the girls, and never heard a thing back from them.

  Isabelle listened, and shook her head slowly. “I don’t know, Olive,” she said.

  And Olive said, “I don’t either.”

  And then one day Isabelle did not show up for supper. Olive went and banged on her door, and Isabelle came to the door—though it took her a long time—and she had bruises up and down her arm, which she showed to Olive as soon as Olive got inside. “Oh, Olive,” she said. “I fell.” And she told Olive how she had been getting into the shower when she fell and for a few moments it seemed she wouldn’t be able to get up, but she did, and now she was very scared. Tears glistened behind her glasses. “I’m scared they’ll move me over the bridge,” she said. And Olive understood.

  That day they each gave the other an extra key to their apartments, and it was decided that every morning and every evening one of them would slip the key into the other’s door and make sure the other was okay, and then just walk out. Olive was surprised at the amount of safety she felt the first time—that night—when she heard her door open at eight o’clock and saw Isabelle walking into her bedroom. Olive waved, and Isabelle waved, and then Isabelle walked out. So it got like that. Olive checked on Isabelle at eight in the morning, and Isabelle checked on her at eight every night. During these times they seldom spoke, just gave a wave, and they both agreed it worked out well.

  One day Olive opened the door to Isabelle’s apartment—it was a little earlier than usual, Olive had been up for hours—and just as she was about to holler “It’s only me,” she heard Isabelle talking, and so she almost walked out, thinking Isabelle had a friend over.

  But then Olive heard this: Isabelle, speaking in a baby voice, said, “Mommy, do you think I’m a good girl?”

  And then Isabelle’s voice changed to a calm, adult voice, and she said, “Yes, honey. I think you’re an awfully good girl. I really do.”

  Isabelle’s baby voice again: “Okay, Mommy, that makes me happy. I try to be a good girl.”

  Isabelle’s adult calm voice: “And you succeed. You’re a very good girl.”

  Baby voice: “Mommy, I need to take a shower.”

  Adult voice: “Okay, honey. You can do that.”

  Baby voice: “I can? Because sometimes I get scared. That I’ll fall or something, Mommy.”

  Adult voice: “Oh, I understand that, honey. But you’ll be okay. You can do it.”

  Baby voice: “Okay, Mommy. Thank you, Mommy. You’re awfully good to me.”

  And then Olive saw Isabelle start moving toward the bathroom, and very quietly, so quietly that Olive felt the tension ripple right down her back, Olive closed the door, hearing it click, and she waited outside the door of Isabelle’s apartment, and after a few moments she heard the shower running, and so Olive went back down the hall to her room.

  Sitting in her wingback chair by the window, Olive kept hearing Isabelle talking to herself in those two different voices; a chill kept going down her arms. Was the woman schizoid? Olive could not stop herself from feeling a deep fear. Maybe Isabelle was going dopey-dope. Another chill ran down Olive’s leg.

  That afternoon, Olive said to Isabelle, as they sat in Olive’s apartment, “I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot.”

  Isabelle looked pleasantly at Olive. “Have you?” she said. When Olive didn’t answer, Isabelle said, “What is it you’ve been thinking, Olive?”

  And Olive said, with a small shrug, “I don’t think my mother ever really liked me. I guess she loved me, but I don’t know if she liked me.”

  Isabelle said, “Oh, Olive, that’s sad.”

  So Olive ju
st took the bull by the horns and said, “What about your mother, Isabelle? Tell me more what she was like.”

  And Isabelle did not change her expression; she just said, “Oh, she loved me. But you know, Olive, I disappointed her. With my pregnancy so early on, that was very hard on my mother. And then she died. And it was very sad, Olive, it’s made me sad all these years, because I would have liked her to live long enough to see that Amy—oh, that Amy is a doctor, and so smart, and I would have liked her to know about my marriage to Frank. She would have felt so much better.”

  “Yes,” Olive said. “Well, that’s life. Nothing you can do about it.”

  “No.” Isabelle shook her head appreciatively. “That’s true. But I miss her these days. Somehow especially these days. Sometimes I talk to her—I even have her talk to me. The way she always would when I was little.” Isabelle shook her head slowly; light reflected off her glasses as she looked at Olive. “It comforts me. And it gets mixed up with my being a mother to Amy, because I don’t think I was such a good mother to her. You know, I’ve told you that before.”

  Olive had to think about this once Isabelle went home. Apparently, Isabelle was not schizoid, nor was she going dopey-dope. She missed her mother and was calling upon her in her own voice. Or in her mother’s voice. For a long time, Olive sat in her chair by the window. A hummingbird came to the trellis, and then a titmouse. Olive, after many minutes of thinking about what Isabelle had told her, said tentatively, “Mother?” And it sounded foolish. Her own voice, an eighty-six-year-old woman’s, saying the word. And she could not answer in her mother’s voice. Nope, it was not going to happen.

  And so, in a way, Olive felt a different layer of bereavement now; Isabelle still had her mother, in some form, and Olive did not. Olive sat, pondering this. After a moment, she stood up and said, “Well, phooey to you,” but she didn’t know who she meant.

  It was June now.

  One week earlier, as Olive had driven out of the parking lot on her way to Walmart, she had seen Barbara Paznik and her husband out taking their morning walk, and Barbara had smiled and waved vigorously. And then apparently (Olive learned this later), Barbara had keeled over soon after; she had had a stroke, and two days later she was dead. Olive was amazed by this, and she was amazed at how distressed she felt.

  She sat now in the early afternoon on one of the chairs set up in the meeting room for Barbara’s memorial service; she had put on a pair of poopie panties just in case. Isabelle had not come because she had not known the woman, and she said she didn’t feel right attending. About twenty people sat in a room that could hold three times that many. No one was weeping; they sat quietly while Barbara’s daughter spoke about her mother always being so upbeat, and then a nephew spoke about Aunt Barbara always being so fun, and then—essentially—that was that. Olive started back to her apartment, then turned and went back toward the meeting room, and she found Barbara’s husband, talking to two women. She waited until he had stopped, then she said, “Barbara tried to be nice to me one day and I wasn’t very pleasant to her. I’m sorry she’s gone. Sorry for you,” she added.

  And the man was so nice! He took her hand and he thanked her, he even called her Olive, and said that she mustn’t worry about how she had treated Barbara; his wife had never said anything to him about it. And then he leaned in and kissed Olive on the cheek. She could not believe it.

  And she could not believe how sad she felt.

  For the entire afternoon she sat by her window in her wingback chair and pondered many things. She had not been nice to Barbara Paznik because the woman came from New York. Then she thought how Barbara Paznik had been younger than Olive, and full of energy, and she was gone now. Dead. Olive kept picturing the woman’s vibrant, pretty face. And somehow Olive, in spite of her two husbands having died, now understood that this had to do with her, with Olive. She was going to die. It seemed extraordinary to her, amazing. She had never really believed it before.

  But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go.

  Olive shifted slightly in her seat, wearing her poopie panties beneath her black trousers and flowery top. She kept thinking: Barbara Paznik was alive, and now she is dead. And then, her mind twirling around, Olive suddenly remembered catching grasshoppers as a child, putting them in a jar with the top on, and her father had said, “Let them out, Ollie, they’ll die.”

  She thought then about Henry, the kindness in his eyes as a young man, and the kindness still there when he was blind from his stroke, the pleasant expression on his face as he sat in that wheelchair, staring. She thought about Jack, his sly smile, and she thought about Christopher. She had been lucky, she supposed. She had been loved by two men, and that had been a lucky thing; without luck, why would they have loved her? But they had. And her son seemed to have come around.

  It was herself, she realized, that did not please her. She moved slightly in her chair.

  But it was too late to be thinking that—

  And so she sat, watching the sky, the clouds high up there, and she looked down then at the roses, which were pretty amazing after just one year. She leaned forward and peered at the rosebush—why, there was another bud coming right behind that bloom! Boy, did that make her happy, the sight of that new fresh rosebud. And then she sat back and thought about her death, and the sense of wonder and trepidation returned to her.

  It would come.

  “Yup, yup,” she said. And for many more minutes she sat there, not even really knowing what she thought.

  Finally Olive stood up slowly, leaning on her cane, and moved to her table. She sat down in her chair, put her glasses on, and put a new sheet of paper into the typewriter. Leaning forward, poking at the keys, she typed one sentence. Then she typed one more. She pulled the sheet of paper out and placed it carefully on top of her pile of memories; the words she had just written reverberated in her head.

  I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.

  Olive stuck her cane to the ground and hoisted herself up. It was time to go get Isabelle for supper.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book: Jim Tierney, Kathy Chamberlain, and Jeannie Crocker, my childhood friend who reassured me about the cultural differences between New York City and Maine; Susan Kamil, Molly Friedrich, Lucy Carson, Dr. Harvey Goldberg, and—always—Benjamin Dreyer.

  About the Author

  ELIZABETH STROUT is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Burgess Boys, named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and NPR; Abide with Me, a national bestseller; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Orange Prize. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker. Elizabeth Strout lives in New York City.

  elizabethstrout.com

  Facebook.com/elizabethstroutfans

  Twitter: @LizStrout

  To inquire about booking Elizabeth Strout for a speaking engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com.

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  Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again (ARC)